Space Hack Review

Article Index

Eschalon: Book II

Publisher:1C Company
Developer:Elemental Games
Release Date:2002-12-20
Genre:
  • Action,Role-Playing,Strategy
Platforms: Theme: Perspective:
  • Top-Down
Buy this Game: Amazon ebay
In fact, it's not just the character development system. The entire game is pretty well balanced. Enemies remain challenging (but not too challenging) from start to finish, and enemies actually drop about as much money as you need to spend. After playing games like Dungeon Siege II and Fable, where you're either given way too much money or else there's an easy exploit for earning infinite money, it was nice to play a game where I had to decide if I could really afford a piece of equipment, factoring in both the purchase cost of the item and its expected repair costs (which are brutally high).

The combat system also works pretty well. Space Hack uses a standard Diablo interface where you left click to do everything. If you left click on the ground, then you move your character. If you left click on an alien, then you attack it. If you hold down the left mouse button, then you either continue to move or continue to attack. This system was simple but effective in Diablo, and it's simple but effective here as well.

The problem Space Hack has is that it doesn't have anything going for it other than the combat. The campaign takes something like 60-80 hours to complete, but there are only 15 trivial side quests to go along with the main quest, there isn't an interesting story to drive you along, the 15 biospheres all look about the same (and they're drab and dull to boot), the equipment is disturbingly basic, and character development is pretty simple. If you want anything more than clicking and killing thousands of aliens, then you're out of luck, because that's all there is to the game.

And so I can't really recommend Space Hack. It is inexpensive, easy to play, and competently constructed (I think it only crashed on me four times during the 60+ hours that I played it), but it's also overly long and not very interesting. Space Hack is definitely the wrong type of game for people who actually want to role play in their role-playing games, but even for people who just want to click and kill things, I'd suggest similarly-priced titles like The Bard's Tale and Heretic Kingdoms over Space Hack.